Preface by
Progress Publishers

Volume 38 of the Fourth Edition of the Collected Works of
V. I. Lenin comprises résumés and excerpts from books,
plus his critical remarks and evaluations concerning various aspects
of Marxist philosophy; it also includes notes, fragments and other
philosophical material.

The volume includes Lenin’s philosophical writings first
published in Lenin Miscellanies IX and XII in
1929-30, and then, from 1933 to 1947, published repeatedly
as a separate book under the title of Philosophical
Notebooks. This material comprises the contents of
ten notebooks, eight of which, relating to 1914-15, were
entitled by Lenin Notebooks on Philosophy. In
addition, the volume includes comments on books dealing
with problems of philosophy and the natural sciences made
by Lenin as separate notes in other notebooks containing
preparatory material, as well as excerpts from books by
various authors, with notes and under lineation by Lenin.

Unlike previous editions of Philosophical
Notebooks, this volume contains Lenin’s comments and
markings in G. V. Plekhanov’s pamphlet Fundamental
Questions of Marxism and in V. Shulyatikov’s book
The Justification of Capitalism in West-European
Philosophy, from Descartes to E. Mach, markings and
underlinings on those pages of A. Deborin’s article
“Dialectical Materialism” which were not
included in earlier editions; comments in G. V. Plekhanov’s
book N. G. Chernyshevsky, including markings, which
in the course of work on this edition were proved to have
been made by Lenin; and a number of notes on books and
reviews of books on philosophy and the natural
sciences. Published in this volume for the first time is a
note which Lenin wrote late in 1904 on a review of The
Wonders of Life and The Riddle of the
Universe, two works by the German biologist Ernst
Haeckel.

A large number of the items included in Philosophical
Notebooks relate to 1914-16. It is no coincidence that
Lenin devoted so much attention to philosophy, and above
all, to Marxist dialectics, precisely during the First World
War, a period in which all the contradictions of capitalism
became extremely acute and a revolutionary crisis
matured. Only materialist dialectics provided the basis for
making a Marxist analysis of the contradictions of
imperialism, revealing the imperialist character of the
First World War, exposing the opportunism and
social-chauvinism of the leaders of the Second
International and working out the strategy and tactics of
struggle of the proletariat. All the works of Lenin written
during that period—the classical treatise
Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
Socialism and War, The United States of Europe Slogan, The
Junius Pamphlet, Socialist Revolution and the Right of
Nations to Self-Determination and other
writings—are inseparable from Philosophical
Notebooks. The creative elaboration of Marxist
philosophy, the Marxist dialectical method, and a profound
scientific analysis of the new historical period were the
basis for Lenin’s great discoveries, which equipped the
proletariat with a new theory of socialist
revolution. Philosophical Notebooks is inspired by
a creative approach to Marxist philosophy, which is
indissolubly bound up with reality, the struggle of the
working class and the policy of the Party.

The volume opens with Lenin’s conspectus of The Holy
Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism by Marx and
Engels. The conspectus written in 1895 traces the
formation of the philosophical and political world outlook
of Marx and Engels. Lenin quotes and marks those passages
in the book which show how Marx approached “the
concept of the social relations of production”
(p. 30 of this volume) and which characterise
“Marx’s view—already almost fully
developed--concerning the revolutionary role of the
proletariat” (p. 26). Lenin gives prominence to Marx
and Engels’ criticism of the subjective sociology of Brunn
and Edgar Bauer and their followers and their idealist
views on the role of “critical-minded people.” Lenin stresses the theses
advanced by the founders of scientific communism: that the
real and actual makers of history are the people, the
working masses; and that “with the thoroughness of the
historical action, the size of the mass who perform it will
therefore increase” (p. 32). These theses are
organically linked with the struggle waged by Lenin at that
time against idealist Narodnik views on “heroes”
and “the crowd,” against attempts to provide a
theoretical basis for the cult of the individual. Lenin made
a detailed résumé of the chapter of the book
in which Marx thoroughly characterises the significance of
l7th-l8th century English and French materialism.

Philosophical Notebooks pays great attention to
German classical philosophy, one of the sources of
Marxism. In a summary of Ludwig Feuerbach’s book,
Lectures on the Essence of Religion, which he wrote
apparently in 1909, Lenin emphasises Feuerbach’s
contributions as a materialist and atheist. He also points
out those propositions in the Lectures expressing
the, materialist conjectures contained in Feuerbach’s views
on society. On the other hand, Lenin reveals the weaknesses
and limitations of Feuerbach’s materialism, noting that
“both the anthropological principle and naturalism are
only inexact, weak descriptions of
m a t e r i a l i s m”
(p. 82). In comparing Marx and Engels’ works of the same
period with Lectures on the Essence of Religion,
which Feuerbach delivered in 1848-49 and which were
published in 1851, Lenin writes: “How far,
even at t h i s time (1848-1851),
h a d Feuerbach
l a g g e d b e h i n d M a r x
(The Communist Manifesto, 1847, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, etc.) and Engels
(1845: Lage)” (p. 77).

In elaborating the theory of materialist dialectics, Lenin
paid special attention to the study and critical analysis of
Hegel’s philosophical legacy. His résumés of
Hegel’s The Science of Logic, Lectures on the History of
Philosophy and Lectures on the Philosophy of
History occupy a central place in Philosophical
Notebooks.

Lenin sharply criticises Hegel’s idealism and the mysticism
of his ideas. But Lenin also reveals the significance of
Hegelian dialectics and points out the necessity for
evaluating it from a materialist standpoint. “Hegel’s
logic,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “cannot be applied
in its given form, it cannot be taken as given. One
must s e p a r a t e o u t from it the logical
(epistemological) nuances, after purifying them from
Ideenmystik. . .” (p. 266). In summarising
Hegel’s writings, Lenin formulates a series of highly
important propositions on the essence of materialist
dialectics.

The brilliant article “On the Question of Dialectics,”
written in 1915, is related to Lenin’s summary of Hegel’s
works. Though small in size, this article is a
crystallisation of unsurpassed depth and richness of thought
of all the important and essential elements in materialist
dialectics.

Lenin’s résumés of Lassalle’s The
Philosophy of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus,
Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Feuerbach’s
Exposition, Analysis and Critique of the Philosophy of
Leibnitz trace the historical preparation of
materialist dialectics. Lenin examines the history of
philosophy from Heraclitus and Democritus to Marx and
Engels, and presents a profound Marxist evaluation of the
work of outstanding thinkers. He reveals the progressive
contribution which they made to the development of
philosophical thought, and at the same time, discloses the
historical limitations of their views.

In his comments on books concerned with the natural
sciences, as well as elsewhere in the volume, Lenin
criticises attempts to reconcile a scientific explanation of
nature with a religious world outlook, the vacillations of
natural scientists—spontaneous
materialists—between materialism and idealism, and
their inability to distinguish between mechanistic and
dialectical materialism. He inveighs against a contemptuous
attitude toward philosophy and philosophical generalisations
and demonstrates the vast importance of materialist
dialectics for the natural sciences and for philosophical
generalisations based on the discoveries of modern science.

The last section of Philosophical Notebooks is made
up of markings and comments by Lenin in books on philosophy
(by G. V. Plekhanov, V. M. Shulyatikov, A. M. Deborin and
other authors), which show how scathingly Lenin criticised
distortions of dialectical and historical materialism. This
criticism is a vivid example of the uncompromising
struggle by Lenin against vulgar materialism and the
slightest deviations from Marxist philosophy.

The remarks made by Lenin in Plekhanov’s book on
Chernyshevsky are of considerable interest. They are
evidence of his great attention to the history of Russian
social thought and his high opinion of its progressive,
materialist traditions. Lenin stresses the revolutionary
democracy and materialism of Chernyshevsky and his
determined struggle against idealism. In pointing out the
shortcomings of Plekhanov’s book and Plekhanov’s failure to
see the class content of Chernyshevsky’s activity, Lenin
writes: “Because of the theoretical
difference between the idealist and materialist views of
history, Plekhanov overlooked the
practical-political and class difference between
the liberal and the democrat” (p. 546).

In Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin consistently
upholds the principle of partisanship in philosophy, and
demonstrates the organic connection between dialectical
materialism and revolutionary practice.

Philosophical Notebooks contains invaluable
ideological richness, and is of immense theoretical and
political significance. In it Lenin elaborates dialectical
and historical materialism, the history of philosophy,
focussing his attention on the problems of materialist
dialectics. Along with his basic philosophical work,
Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Philosophical
Notebooks is an outstanding achievement of Lenin’s
creative genius.

Lenin’s excerpts and comments provide a definition of
dialectics as the science of the most general laws of
development and cognition of the objective world. Of
exceptional importance is his proposition on the identity of
dialectics, logic and the theory of knowledge. He pointed
out that the fundamental failure of metaphysical materialism
was its inability to apply dialectics to the process and
development of cognition; dialectics, he stressed,
is the theory of knowledge of Marxism. In his
Philosophical Notebooks Lenin advanced Marxist
dialectics still further by elaborating the question of the
dialectical process of cognition and the dictum that the
dialectical way of cognising objective reality consists in
the transition from living perception to abstract thought
and from this to practice.

In elaborating materialist dialectics, Lenin concentrated
on the problem of contradictions. It is in Philosophical
Notebooks that he explains that the doctrine of the
unity and struggle of opposites is the essence and core of
dialectics, that the struggle of opposites is the source of
development. “The splitting of a single whole and the
cognition of its contradictory parts ... is the
e s s e n c e
(one of the ‘essentials,’ one of the
principal, if not the principal, characteristics or
features) of dialectics” (p. 359).

It may be presumed that the preparatory material of
Notebooks on Philosophy is evidence of Lenin’s
intention to write a special work on materialist dialectics,
a task which he had no opportunity to fulfil. Although the
material in Philosophical Notebooks does not
constitute a complete work written by Lenin for
publication, it is an important contribution to the
development of dialectical materialism. The study of the
great ideological content of Philosophical
Notebooks is of tremendous importance for a thorough
grasp of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the theoretical
foundation of scientific communism.

* *

*

The summaries as well as the rest of this volume are given
chiefly in chronological order. Remarks made in books have
also been arranged chronologically in a separate section.

All of Lenin’s underlineation has been reproduced in
type. Words underscored by a wavy or a straight thin line
have been set in italics; those underscored by two
lines—in spaced italics; those underscored by three
straight thin lines—in boldface, etc.

The text of this edition has been checked with Lenin’s
manuscripts; quotations have been verified with original
sources.

Notes, an index of the sources mentioned by Lenin, name and
subject indexes are appended.